As a growing area of inquiry in STS, maintenance studies brings two critical insights to the post-Actor Network Theory (ANT) landscape. First, relations are not a state of nature, but once established, take a great amount of ongoing, behind-the-scenes effort to maintain and mend (Star, 1991; Denis and Pontille, 2019). Second, a greater locus of scientific research and innovation is invested in the assemblies of maintenance and repair than in the creation of novel ones (Edgerton, 2011). Stability is ever produced through a constant recognition and remediation of the material fragility of things (Denis & Pontille, 2023).
In their seminal article in Theory, Culture & Society, Graham and Thrift (2007) dug forth the ever-expanding arena of maintenance and repair that constitute infrastructures and objects which otherwise remain invisible to the public eye, doing their job. Moments of breakdown cast socially unacceptable ruptures in the fabric of life, inviting all forms of labor, learning, and innovation to keep going. Their dig on the inevitable politics of maintenance, “to invent the train is to also invent the train crash” (p. 4), struck me as a gut-churning reflection on the state of Himalayan forests in the aftermath of large-scale tree plantation programs. On one hand, global afforestation and nature restoration programs aim to repair the historical excesses of extractive industry and empire. On the other hand, the science which guides these programs tends to be far removed from the place, history, and nature of the contagion. This dissonance instills a deep sense of fragility on the promise of restored futures in the Global South. What if the “politics of maintenance” never takes place, and rural populations are forced to live with the inevitable crash?
This realization has sunk deeper and clearer over the course of my ongoing fieldwork in the forests of Kangra, a district in the Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh. I first glimpsed the forests of the Baahar Forest Cooperative Society (BFCS) in 2016. They had followed a fresh bout of rain during spring, with a hint of cold, moist air, and the sweet smell of pine. One could almost forget that the forest hadn’t existed even a hundred years ago. The forests have grown from subsequent tree plantation activities carried out by BFCS, which started in the late 1940s together with the state forest department. The forest canopy now covers the entire expanse around the village Baahar, including adjacent hills up North. However, the sweet, moist scent of pine was short-lived. Subsequent visits that summer turned putrid. I choked and gasped for clean air as smoke covered expansive stretches of the landscape. Graham & Thrift’s (2007) warning—“to make forests, is to also make the forest fires”—stuck as a corollary deeply relevant for a warming planet undergoing massive tree plantations.
The resin-tapped pine forests do not offer a useful understory. The pine litter prevents herbaceous vegetation, is slippery to walk, and fuels summer fires. Image by Syed Shoaib Ali.
Tree plantations are globally posed as a win-win strategy for multiple goals including rural development, nature preservation, and carbon sequestration (Arora-Jonsson 2015; Flieschman et al., 2020). Plantation projects are carried out with gusto and are legitimated by global mandates. For example, the United Nations has declared 2021-30 as the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration to “end poverty, combat climate change and prevent a mass extinction” (decadeonrestoration.org), where “restoration needs to be carried out in ways that balance social, economic and environmental objectives and with the engagement of relevant stakeholders, including indigenous peoples and local communities” (United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030), 2019).
Within this milieu of ideal practices, there is an increasingly widespread recognition of the need for nature restoration (rather than simply tree plantation), and community participation as a critical pathway for achieving multi-faceted goals (Chazdon, 2020; Coleman et al., 2021). Yet, envisioned and enacted large scale tree plantation and nature restoration projects in the Global South operate under a core assumption—that the science to bring about resilient, meaningful, and enduring outcomes already exists.
My postdoctoral research together with Dr. Harry Fischer (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), Dr. Dil Khatri (Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies), and Dr. Forrest Fleischman (University of Minnesota) grapples with the opposite—a widespread realization among rural communities, forest guards, bureaucrats, and workers that the science to bring about enduring outcomes does not exist, but consists of makeshift experimental attempts at living in/with the industrial aftermaths of past projects and events. In BFCS, the species of choice, Pinus roxburghii, was a product of scientific forestry, valued for resin, timber, and fuelwood. It was planted across stretches of the lower and the middle Himalayas. Where other trees struggled to take hold, Pinus roxburghii regenerated quickly and thrived on relatively dry and rocky mountain slopes. It’s only in the aftermath that the pyrophile nature of these trees comes to matter for the foresters and rural communities. What appeared once as an economic agronomic pathway at one point became a costly mess, with no clear solution in sight.
In forthcoming work, we expand upon Denis and Pontille’s take on “fragility” (2023) as not a condition necessarily characterized by some material weakness (or falling apart of a thing in itself) of the things at work, such as seedlings, saplings, and soil, but the enduring temporality of things in ways that are undesirable or inhospitable to human existence. Fragility is also a condition where things frustrate their planners and maintainers with their stubbornness (ibid.), a pervasive feature of Anthropocene environments (Tsing et al., 2020). Taking maintenance into serious consideration requires seeing breakdowns and failures not as atypical or worth addressing only when things lead into catastrophe; “instead to take breakdown and failure as the very means by which societies learn …the multifarious activities of repair and maintenance become not just secondary and derivative but pivotal” to innovation and improvement (Graham & Thrift, 2007, p. 5) . Denis and Pontille (2023) call it “material diplomacy” (p. 219) that fosters variegated cultures and conditions.
But forests in the Global South are unsurprisingly unlike the infrastructures of automobility, power, internet, or software where the inevitable train crash must rally a range of actors to remediate, repair, and maintain the ongoingness of life, and where maintenance holds the locus of constant learning, research, and innovation. Most participants in global afforestation/restoration programs do not have the political voice to call for maintenance and remediation. While there is widespread relation between forest fires and history of intensive tree plantation (Choi et al., 2006; Zald and Dunn, 2018; Lindenmayer et al., 2023; Pausas et al., 2008), the fires may not be as critical to the loss of measured carbon stock. In the global turn to offset emissions in the South, what happens to people living therein may never garner the right kind of attention. When things fall apart, people may have to live with the remains of the landscape, just as the communities in Baahar do. In forthcoming work, we not only highlight the absence of a restorative agenda centered on living in/with the industrial aftermaths, but we also aim to foreground possible ways in which scientists and social scientists can pay deeper attention to maintenance in their work on plantation and restoration landscapes.
Harsh sun burns our feet/But the trees give us shade/Save forests from fire : The forest department runs campaigns like these to recruit local residents to fight the forest fires. Most of the time, no one comes. Image by Syed Shoaib Ali.
There are deeper caveats of not paying attention to maintenance. First is the misdirection of scientific investment away from questions of living in/with industrial environments in ways that matter. Second is the risk of spreading facile ontologies of nature and community participation that preservation and restoration may entail. Consider this: while strong community participation is increasingly a requirement of ideal afforestation and restoration practices, dimensions of temporality are rarely considered in what construes as participation.
Attention to temporality could reshape our understanding of participation. At the time BFCS carried out tree plantations, there was widespread community consensus, including revenue sharing arrangements with Society members, that Pinus roxburghii were native to the Western Himalayas, and that the rural households including those from oppressed castes benefited from selling fuel wood to the nearby town. The plantations reduced their walking hours to the forest and back. Native and useful in multiple ways at that point in time, Pinus roxburghii made for an easy choice for everyone. However, in some six decades of multi-faceted rural transformations, fuel wood has become less of a commodity. In sharp contrast to prior consensus, there is deep dissensus against living with the pine forests. Pine litter covers the ground, preventing other flora from taking root. The litter is slippery to walk on, and is highly flammable. With its pyrophilic abilities and evolved resistance to fire, the extensive afforestation programs made Pinus roxburghii into an invasive Anthropocene behemoth it never was.
By the 21st century, entire landscapes have been subsumed under forest fires. Plumes of smoke sometimes stretch all the way into Indo-Gangetic plains (Goswani, 2018; Khadka, 2021; Mishra & Azad, 2021). The state of Himachal Pradesh banned Pinus roxburghii from all its nurseries in 2002. Now, the Pinus roxburghii are starting to take over old-growth oak forests in the Western Himalayas (Das et al., 2021; Kacker et al., 2024). What was counted as participatory and beneficial in the mid-20th century has become a stubborn mess by the 21st. The forest guards, rural residents, workers, and other bureaucrats whom I met during fieldwork constantly struggled at helping the new broad-leaf plantations survive adjoining pine-lit forest fires. Some of the newer plantations are financed by international agencies which required the tree plantation projects to be participatory and restorative in principle and practice. No scientific manual or best practices guide exists to instruct workers, guards, bureaucrats, or local governments on how to craft novel interventions with the mess at hand.
Technoscientific pathways to address “ecological anxiety ‘(Robbins and Moore 2013) will not emerge from scientific debates in Nature, or Science, or from the cutting-edges of invasion biology. We also don’t need a better classification or categorization, unless it embodies the vast and variegated ambit of maintenance activities. What we need are ways of knowing and being that emerge from situated and enduring participation in the life of species and interventions, in the making and maintenance of conditions that matter. To accept a new premise where the knowledge to bring about enduring outcomes is ever incomplete, is to accept that restoration sciences and restoration projects must foster a deeper, more democratic commitment to knowledge building.
This post was curated by Multimedia Contributing Editors Prerna Srigyan and Hae-Seo Kim.
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